If you still don’t know what a freelancer is, then this is your five-minute eureka of the day. In a nutshell, a freelancer is anybody who offers professional services online in exchange of funds. You can offer pretty much any type of service you want be it teaching, translating, redacting, proofreading, virtual assistant at a long et cetera. It basically boils down to what your skills are and how much are you willing to charge for them.
There are, just like everything in life, pros and cons about this. But the idea of this whole practice is to approach them from a positive perspective or else, you risk to fail miserably. For instance, one of the negative aspects that people in general complain about is that according to them it hardly pays any money but if you are going to dive in this new adventure, you need to realize that this is probably not going to turn into your main income. Chances are, this new revenue will help you pay the bills but will not afford a luxurious boat but this is what it’s all about, a little extra work for a little extra money that can help you ease up that time of the month when the bills pile up.

Something else worth noticing is that people criticize the schedule of the majority of posts. Considering that most of these gigs begin in a regular office where working hours are nine to five, logic dictates that most of your services have to be provided during these hours. Of course, this is the time of the day that you are unable to carry out the tasks because you are working. As a solution to this, try to focus on jobs that are not to be delivered –on the spot-. Instead, try to focus on activities that give you a time window for you to finish. These may take longer to collect but in the end, will help you the most.

Another downbeat of the freelancer world is how virtually crowded it is. There is simple too much competition which in consequence lowers the chances of being selected for a position. Since pretty much all of these websites rank freelancers based on performance and experience, this affects directly to newer members as they don’t count with enough positive reviews or experience to be considered trustworthy. The key to overcome this is patience and setting prices for your services so they can be more consumer-friendly. One day you will have your first client and when that happens, that’s when money is going to start rolling in.

This previous issue brings us to another negative aspect: price of your services. Given that sometimes there are simply too many applicants or freelancers in general, all offering the same services at the same time, applicants are forced to lower the prices in hopes that this measure will help them get more clients. This can be perceived from different perspectives but in the end the lower your prices are, the more clients you could get and the faster your reputation will be built (if you perform according to what is expected from you, that is). Once you have enough positive reviews, you can increase your prices a notch as you will be perceived as a more reliable worker.